


In All Your Ways

by awed_frog



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s10e19 The Werther Project, Feels, M/M, Missing Scene, Purgatory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2018-03-25 14:20:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3813712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awed_frog/pseuds/awed_frog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean waits for Sam to get better and ends up praying to Cas. Whoops.<br/>#these things happen #especially when someone is always on your mind</p><p>Missing scene from S10E19, The Werther Project</p>
            </blockquote>





	In All Your Ways

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for the gratuitous fluff. I have a feeling this season is going to end very badly, so I'm going to grab my happiness where I can.
> 
> Disclaimer: not mine, and so on.

_No evil will befall you, nor will any plague come near your tent,  
For He will command His angels to protect you in all your ways._

Psalms, 91:10-11

 

Dean likes to build, to repair and maintain; he is a mechanic at heart, and he's always disapproved of how the world works, how everything can descend into chaos so easily and rapidly, and how much time and effort it takes to put it back together.

And _blood_ , man, blood is tough, especially when it's your baby brother, and you want to be quick, you _need_ to be quick – Dean knows perfectly well that Sam will be alright, because they’ve both been there before, they've both bled enough to know what happens next, but it's still a motherfucking pain in the ass, how much time it takes to fix this, to feel safe again.

Going back to the bunker had been out of the question. Dean had abandoned Cas' Continental outside the haunted house and had driven the Impala to the nearest hospital, Sam slumped down in the seat beside him. His brother had opened his eyes just once, when he'd felt the car slow down. He'd pushed his face against the glass, the way he used to do as a small kid, and he'd seen enough to understand where they were. Dean had kind of hoped he wouldn't notice.

“Don't - don't leave me here. Please.”

Sam hadn't been strong enough to turn his head and look at him, but Dean had known exactly what was going through his brain - the white room, the electroshocks. Lucifer.

_My fault. All of it._

“I won't, okay?” he'd said, roughly. “You need blood, Sammy. I'll go get some and come back. In and out. You stay here, ok? Can you do that for me?”

There had been no answer from Sam. Dean had gone out, rummaged in the trunk, ruthless, efficient. He’d found a single standard maintenance uniform, Sam's, a bit too big for him. He'd made do. And he'd kept his promise: in and out in ten minutes, his arms full of stuff - candy bars and energy drinks bought from the hospital cafeteria - and two bags of blood stashed under his shirt.

Sam shuffles in his sleep, and Dean jolts back to reality, presses a reassuring hand on his arm. The IV is still there - his brother needs to stay still, but, of course, it's Sam – he can sleep anywhere, but he tosses and turns, and ends up looking like a fluffy starfish, hair and limbs all over the place, by the time he's finally asleep. So Dean keeps stroking him, very lightly, on his arm, up to the curve of his shoulder, until Sam frowns in his sleep and settles down.

Dean relaxes back in his chair, stretches his legs, checks his own bandages. They cut it too close today. They must be more careful. If Sam had been alone, as he’d planned - Dean can’t think about that.

“Cas?” he calls, and then waits for a second, but, of course, there's no answer. 

He's prayed enough to know there's never an answer; and he also knows that Cas can't come to him, not now. His wings are not strong enough. So it's a one-sided conversation, in a way, but Dean has made a habit of it in Purgatory, and despite everything that happened there, despite his moments of doubt, despite the thousand different ways he'd imagined Cas’ death in that bloody forest, he still has faith. He knows the angel can hear him, and that's enough.

“Cas, I don’t know if you’re back yet - I sort of had to take your car, man. I’m sorry. We’ll be back tomorrow, how’s that?”

Dean hesitates. There’s things he should tell Cas about today, but he doesn’t want to worry him too much. Things are sticky enough on his end - he and Charlie have been looking into the Demon Tablet. Last Dean's heard, they were trying to track down Aaron Webber, who was first on the list to replace - Dean shuts his mind to the thought. Thing is, little Aaron is likely to become a prophet, and Cas wants to keep an eye on him. 

“Anyway, I just wanted to let you know what's going on on our end. We're okay. I mean, Sam is - Sam is an idiot. Lost some blood. All by himself, if you can believe it. But we destroyed some evil box from hell, and we found a book. And I'm alright,” he adds, as an afterthought, remembering that this is always the first thing Cas asks him.

_Dean. Are you alright?_

That's his trademark sentence, always with that weird full stop between his name and the rest of it, as if Cas got distracted in the middle and forgot what he wanted to ask. Which he shouldn't, because he always asks the same bloody thing.

“I was in Purgatory again,” he blurts out, after a stretch of silence, “If you can believe that. Met Benny, and all. Well, not the real Benny. It was a kind of - a hallucination, I guess.”

Dean remembers all of it, remembers it perfectly. The soft ground under his feet, the peculiar half light, the smell of clean mountain air. Hell, he spent one year in the place. He's not surprised his subconscious can draw up a life-quality picture of it.

“You weren't there, though. Which is good, I guess, because-”

Dean doesn't finish the sentence because, thank God, he heard the second half in his mind before saying it out loud. 

_Because Benny was talking me into killing myself, and if that had been you, Cas, I don't know what I would have done._

No, Cas doesn't need to hear that. Dean passes a hand on the back of his neck, takes a deep breath.

“I haven't forgiven you for that, you know. Not really.” He hasn't been planning to say this, either. It just slipped out. “I understand why you did it - hell, I would have done the same - but it went on for freaking _months_ , man. I thought you were dead.”

And Dean knows what Cas would do if he were here - he would look at him, a bit puzzled - Dean actually misses the way he used to cock his head to one side - and would say, in his careful voice, _Then why did you keep praying to me?_ \- because, well, sometimes Cas is worse than Sammy, and despite his vast knowledge of bees and Leviathans and dead languages, he doesn't understand anything, anything at all.

And now Dean is going to a bad place, he’s remembering all the embarrassing things he's said in those prayers - how he begged Cas to come back, how he told him he needed him, over and over again. Thank God Cas has never mentioned that.

Yes, thank God. 

Imagine having that conversation with Cas. _Right._

Because, well, Dean knows exactly when he realized - when he looked at Cas and just _knew_ , because this isn’t a passing fancy, it’s not about Jimmy Novak’s blue eyes, or anything. No, Dean is Dean, and he is a bloody idiot, and he'd figured it out when he'd seen Cas dying - when he'd seen his body on the dirty ground of that crypt, and he’d felt his heart disappear into his guts, cease to exist, because Cas had been- he'd been dead right there in front of him, and, oh God, _Cas, you_ child _, why didn’t you listen to me?_

And still he didn’t - he couldn’t say anything. Not when Cas came back, not when he sacrificed himself for Sammy, and not even during those long months in Purgatory. He’d never sleep there, of course, he hadn’t needed to, but he checked his watch, religiously, and every day he would stop walking around at nine o’clock, and just sit and look up at the sky for three hours, just to pretend stuff was normal. To take a break from it all. He'd needed to remember who he was, that he was still alive, that Sammy was waiting for him, that Cas was still out there. And he would pray. Every night. At first under his breath, because that’s how he’d learned how, as a small child, on his knees by his bed, and then, once Benny had joined him, he would just think about Cas. _At_ Cas, somehow. And Dean had never been sure about how much Cas had heard of his prayers - because Dean would think in words, but here and there he would simply close his eyes and think about the angel, about his fleeting smile and the sharp angles of his body. And Dean wasn’t sure - had Cas seen that? Would he even understand what those thoughts meant? 

It doesn’t matter, though. That he never said anything, never done anything. He will become of one those - those _things_ in Purgatory, and soon. He will become something so vicious and cursed that even Crowley will turn him away, just like it happened last time. He will have to submit to the Mark completely, and Dean knows what that is like, he’s lived through it before, he remembers the savage joy of killing, of hacking a man to pieces and lick the blood from his blade afterwards - he was in Hell when he learned how to do that, how to like the coppery taste of human blood, how to feel the exhilarating power of taking a life - 

_That's why you're here, Dean. That's the purity you crave - killing with no consequence._

And now Dean is breathing hard, he’s panicking, and all he wants is to lie down next to Sam and bury his head in the crook of his brother’s neck, exactly like he used to do at the age of twelve - he would wake up from a nightmare, sweaty, confused, bloody terrified, and he knew it was no good, no good to go to his father for help, knew his father was probably not even there, his bed cold and unslept in, and Dean would come out from a sickening dream to find himself in a sickening reality - two children alone in a motel room, in a world full of monsters. He would sit up, hesitate, always, the way children do, before putting his feet on the floor - and Dean had more reasons than most children to worry about angry stuff hiding underneath his bed - and then he’d cross the room, quickly, and jump into Sam’s bed. Sammy never woke up, and he always smelled - well, not good, exactly, eight-year-old boys do not smell _good_ , but it was familiar, comforting, _real_. A smell of child and nice things.

Dean raises one hand towards his brother, lets it fall again. He doesn’t want to wake him up, and, anyway, there is no place for him in that bed. There’s barely enough place for Sam, because Sam is no longer a child, he’s a bloody sasquatch and Dean can’t climb into bed with him and smell his neck. The idea is so ridiculous that a small smile comes to his lips. No, Sam is fully grown, and that's why he'll be alright after -

“Cas," calls Dean, and his voice comes out a bit choked up. "Cas, if you’re still listening, sorry I-”

He doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for. Leaving a long break between sentences? Calling Cas up in the first place just to say nothing at all? Hell. There are so many things he should apologize to Cas for. And he should start doing it, before it’s too late. He could start, in fact, by apologizing for asking Cas to kill him. Because what Benny said, well, that’s the truth. 

_Do you think they will ever recover from that? It will_ ruin _them._

Dean lowers his head, closes his eyes, tries not to go there, not bloody _think_ , but here is something else he’s never learned how to do. All the disturbing shit he’s done and seen in his life, and he can’t forget any of it. God knows he’s tried.

So now, of course, bloody _now_ , when Dean can’t go anywhere, can’t drive, can’t drink, because he must be there for his idiotic, self-sacrificing brother, now _that_ conversation comes to the surface again, the soft ‘Dean’, the slow, careful words which came after.

“There is something you must understand about what you’ve asked me to do,” Cas had said, and Dean had looked down into his whiskey, because, what else did they need to say? He’d asked Cas, his - his best friend - to kill him, so what was left?

“The Mark protects you. It wants you alive,” Cas had added, a bit warily, and, again, Dean hadn’t looked at him. What was the point? He knew all of this already.

“The only way to kill you -”

Cas had stopped, and now Dean had looked at him, and the look on the angel’s face -

“- I would have to destroy you completely. Your soul would be gone. Forever. No part of you would remain.”

And it’d been stupid, sure, that sudden tightening in Dean’s chest - it’s not like he’d been imagining himself in Heaven, wearing PJs, perhaps, as his mother baked him a pie. He’d not imagined, at all, how it would be like to wait for Sammy to come home as well - many, many years later, of course, but, then again, time worked differently up there. No, he definitely hadn’t been thinking about Cas, the fact that Cas could visit, now the angels had forgiven him. He hadn’t planned any of it, really. The lazy strolls, and fishing side by side as the sky turned golden and purple around them. Making fun of Cas’ stupid trenchcoat, and maybe figure out what was underneath, passing his fingers on the buttons of his shirt just to see if the thing really opened, even in Heaven, because Dean remembers opening it before, one button after the other, and it had been the most awkward, unpleasant moment of his life - Sammy had been just there, looming over him like a goddamn giant, and Cas had been staring right ahead, completely oblivious, and Dean had had to - he’d had to open those damn buttons, and pass his fingers on Cas’ chest, and carve the banishing runes into his skin, hoping against hope his thoughts - his longing, his fear - wouldn’t show on his face, or at all - couldn’t the bloody angel read his goddamn mind, after all?

So, no, Dean had not been thinking about that. At all. So it hadn’t been a shock, a fucking punch right in the face, to learn that after everything that had happened, his soul would just be gone, forever. Not at all.

In the weeks after that, though, Dean had made his peace with it. So he would just disappear - well. Whatever. Still counted as peace and quiet. Still beat forty years in Hell. And if he’d never see his brother again - if he’d never see Cas again -

“Cas?” he calls, but of course, there is no answer.

Sam is still out cold, and the motel is eerily quiet. It’s late afternoon. The rooms around them must be empty. 

“Cas, I’m sorry about - about what I asked you to do. I am.”

Dean tries to sit up straight, get some dignity back, stop this fucking helpless feeling burning up his blood. He thinks, wildly, that maybe there is a way out - maybe he can ask _Crowley_ to kill him. Sure, he doesn’t know if Crowley would keep his word, if he even has the juice for the job, but -

Again, Benny’s ghostly figure rises up in his memory. _It would_ ruin _them._

“I know what you - I’m not sure I could do it, if it was the other way around.”

 _Hell, I_ know _I couldn’t._

“So, well, I’m sorry, okay?”

Dean is grasped by the sudden, horrible idea that Cas is not listening at all. Dude is busy, after all. Aaron Webber’s mom had turned into a religious nut after her son’s abduction, had joined some kind of cult deep in the Sonoran Desert. Charlie and Cas are probably in the middle of something. Or they could be in danger, they could be -

 _Do not go there_ , Dean tells himself roughly. _Do_ not _go there. They are_ fine.

“Cas, are you listening to me?”

It’s a stupid question, but still, he waits for an answer. He _needs_ an answer. 

“Are you there?” he asks, a bit desperately.

And then, right when he’s decided he’s an idiot, and he should stop being such a girl - he needs to take a shower, maybe sleep for a few hours - there is a noise. It’s coming from - from the other bed? Dean gets to his feet at once, unsheathes his knife, circles the room in slow, careful steps.

There is nothing on his bed, just the plastic bag from the hospital. Dean prods it with the blade, even though he knows what’s inside. Candy bars, sugary drinks. But then, just when he's decided he's hearing things, the bag flutters again. 

_What the hell?_

Dean glances back at Sam to check he’s still sleeping, then, with a quick, precise movement, he rips the bag open, and the snacks scatter all over the cheap blanket. Three plastic bottles, two bags of chocolate candy, and one of those pansy organic bars Sammy likes to eat, with seeds and honey and other rabbity ingredients. Dean’s had to survive on them during that whole Leviathan fun ride, and knows full well they taste like sawdust. Also, apparently, they’re haunted or something, because the bar is vibrating slightly, making small, plasticky noises - and next, the packaging rips, and a weedy, greenish thing slithers out from it. Dean raises his knife, then lets it fall again. 

It’s a plant. A bloody _plant_. It’s also growing, very fast, into something fairly large. 

“Is that you? Are _you_ doing this?” he asks the empty room, and then, despite his better judgement, he lets the knife drop back inside his bag, and walks closer to the candy bar - slash - weird plant from hell (well: _heaven_ ), picks it up. 

The thing is now one foot tall, but it’s still growing. It has tiny white roots, and they crawl around Dean’s hands like living things, hugging his fingers, tickling his skin. Dean can only watch, with a sort of sceptical, exasperated fascination as the plant twists and turns towards his face, grows leaves and buds. When it stops changing, it’s almost two feet tall. It’s dark green, and seems ready to bloom. It's nothing Dean has ever seen - definitely not a sunflower, or a pumpkin, and he really has no idea - the seeds on that bar could have been anything. Some healthy crap. It certainly costed more than all the other candy put together.

“Cas, I’m not sure,” he starts, and then there is a loud pop, and another one, and Dean is so surprised by the sudden noise he almost drops the bloody plant - until he realizes what the noises are - the thing is actually _blooming_ , huge white _flowers_ are zapping into existence one after the other, until there’s a dozen of them, and now Dean is grinning like a goddamn idiot. 

“Man, you can’t give another guy _flowers_ , that’s so -” and the word is right there, right on his lips, but Dean is suddenly unable to say it out loud, because, well.

“What’s that noise?” says Sam, weakly, from the other bed, and Dean turns towards him, a bit guiltily, his hands full of green and white - the leaves are so wide, Dean isn’t even sure Sam can see his face.

Before he can think of anything to say, though, his brother is asleep again, and Dean remains rooted to the spot, in the middle of the room, breathing in the heady scent of the white flowers, and smiling like a lunatic, because, well, Cas is - he’s _insane_ , really. Creating _flowers_ , just like that. From thin air. For _him_.

He clears his throat, tries to get a grip on himself.

"Well, thanks. I guess. You really know how to make a guy feel special."

Dean was trying for humour, but it's come out a bit different.

"Good to know you're alright. Guess I'll see you tomorrow, then," he adds, quickly, and then he stops, hesitates. "Don't go thinking I'll show up with flowers, though. Or chocolate," he says, a bit roughly, but as he's finishing his sentence he knows exactly what he'll do - there was a farmers' market, back in town, and he's bound to find some good honey there. Not that Cas _eats_ , of course, but he likes sweet things. And, well, it's just honey. _It's not like I'm getting the guy a bloody ring_ , he thinks, and going there was clearly a mistake, because now he's left standing in the middle of the quiet room, his hands full of flowers, trying his best to silence the bittersweet longing swelling in his throat.


End file.
